Memorial Day
Families gather at the cemetery to honor
fallen soldiers as the Governor recollects
the Preamble’s invocation of a more perfect union,
America’s freedom and her might.
Out there in the periphery, the place
my effete neighbors call Nowhere or Hicksville
a child shudders in her mothers’ arms,
nose bleeding and head pounding with
the pressure of the fracking brine
pushing out of her skull while the
alien sweet stink wafts up from
the faucet’s brown-yellow water.
Mom’s mascara streaks down her cheeks.
For some reason she still tries.
A mother wipes mustard from her son’s
American flag shirt, annoyed. The Governor
quotes John F. Kennedy, asks that
we do for our country instead of what our
country can do for us. He rose to the rank of
Captain in the National Guard.
The Horns quarter horse mare drank
from the pond since she was a foal.
She went wandering after they drilled
next door and the pond changed color.
Steve kept her away but she got there,
such a creature of habit. Blind, nostrils
enflamed, she stumbled into the barbed
wire fence. She probably would’ve died like
the frogs and the neighbor’s German Shepherd
did later from the TDS, toluene, benzene, and
radium. It was just as well that they shot her.
It took two bullets. The blood never made it
to the pond.
Sacrifice. We give over animals, ourselves, or
possessions to offer fealty, to plead for better days,
or ask for forgiveness, mercy, and justice from
the Almighty. Sometimes it’s in effigy. Other times
in just a simple offering. Or, Jeptha, we
give our daughters’ blood to the lord. The Governor rose to be a
Captain in the National Guard’s 28th Infantry Division.
A retired teacher is arrested on her own property,
spends her savings to stop the Mariner pipeline
from treating her heritage, her legacy, and
her progeny like a nest of insects in need of
containment but hoped-for extermination. It’s
too bad that she speaks English better than
the Yes Men do and her daughter is an
oak seeding a thousand acorns.
A Marine stands during the 21-gun salute. His
stomach turns, knowing his flag is being soaked in
natural gas and burned in front of him. He kneels
on the scarred leg from Desert Storm. The mustard
stains the boy’s shirt. His mother is annoyed.
How can she wash it out?
* * *
*This is another in my poem of the day that I share on Facebook. You can backtrack through the posts or use the tag “Poem of the Day” to read previous entries.
Peter Walks for Democracy 